Kodiak Networks Calls in $15M in Series B

Date:   Saturday , October 01, 2005

Mobile phone voice application service provider Kodiak Networks co-founded by Kris Patel has closed a $15 million Series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Redpoint Ventures. Kodiak will use the fund to expand its 250 person staff and spur more business partnerships.

Founded in 2001, this San Ramon, CA based company supplies the Push-to-Talk real time availability updates, instant group conferencing, instant voice messaging and group Short Messaging Service technology to major cellular phone makers all over the world and to all types of service providers. The Kodiak mobile solution scales from single site to multinational implementations and enables a variety of voice services to meet personal and cultural requirements.

“The demand for wireless service continues to grow at a rapid pace, however the average rate per user and the average revenue per minute have stabilized or declined in the overall industry. Kodiak has distinguished itself by enabling carriers to offer differentiated, profitable and revenue enhancing voice services that utilize their existing infrastructure,” says Patel, qualifying VC interest in Kodiak Networks.

This in itself offers a huge market for the company. “We would put the market size at about $25 billion, growing in the next five years to somewhere between $45-50 billion,” says Patel adding the Kodiak solution mainly competes with Motorola and Nokia VoIP based PTT implementations.

Patel holds a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.